Audio for the morning:
From the outside, Bluesky may seem like a Twitter clone. But anyone who’s close to the technology — and the team — knows that they’re building something much deeper: they’re rethinking the internet’s architecture to create a more flexible, user-centric web.
I really enjoy listening to these, and come up with a bunch of conclusions. For one, it's incredible and quickly unnerving to see the widespread use of the word "awesome" for virtually everything. Then, Bluesky folks are undisputably great at doing marketing for their brainchild. Which has good and bad sides to it. They don't have solutions to a lot of interesting problems yet, but in a way they seem better at making them transparent and obvious: With all the ActivityPub based Fediverse focused on the individual server, no one (not even conceptually) "owns" things such as bandwidth consumption for communication between these nodes, for data storage costs all across the infrastructure, for resource consumptions on the individual node to handle loads of in- and outbound traffic. The AT protocol model of the world at least has these on the list, plus it seems to strive more for that vote-with-your-feet - idea of you just taking your data (yes /all/ your data) and just switch your provider if the one you're left with isn't feasible for you anymore (a feature I could have direly needed earlier this year in my pixelfed mess). Bluesky is still quite a bit from that and has its own slew of issues to tackle, but I still ... wonder whether it's further from that than ActivityPub is from actually making account data portable in a reliable manner. Or from adding something like distributed moderation with moderators of communities spread all across different instances aren't necessarily the folks to run instances. It will be interesting and somehow I am also waiting for AT to be submitted to a standardization body like the IETF which might be a smarter choice and place than the W3C as a much more "web-centric" entity. And I learnt on the sidenote that Paul Frazee, the guy who did this show on the Bluesky end, apparently worked with the Beaker Browser and SSB community before which also was new to me and seems quite good a reference point to start with. Worth listening, after all, despite way too much commenting on my end having gone on here.